Analysis from Israel
For 60 years, America has rejected military action against nuclear programs. Iran won’t be the exception.

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If I could ask every cabinet minister to read one thing now that the

holidays are over and they are getting back to business, it wouldn’t be a

great classic or a scholarly tome. It would be an 800-word
href=”http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/obama-vs-netanyahu-7515?page=1″

target=”_blank”>journal article by a PhD student arguing

that regardless of who wins November’s US presidential election, there’s

no chance America will ever take military action against Iran’s nuclear

program.

Other pundits have advanced this claim


href=”http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/109873/why-romney-wont-strike-iran”

target=”_blank”>before, often persuasively. But what makes

Gabriel Scheinmann’s piece in The National Interest unique is that he doesn’t

ground it in either domestic or foreign-policy considerations, which

could theoretically change. Rather, he points to a consistent,

half-century-old policy tradition in which successive US governments,

both Democratic and Republican, have repeatedly considered preemptive

military action against nuclear programs, and always decided against it –

from the Soviet Union in the 1950s through China in the 1960s all the

way to Syria in 2007.

Scheinmann doesn’t detail why successive governments rejected military

action, but the reasons are fairly obvious: Most of the same arguments –

from reluctance to be seen as the aggressor through belief in the

feasibility of containment to fear of sparking a war – are made today by

opponents of military action against Iran. But there’s another, even

more important reason that often goes unspoken: America is a superpower.

Hence even another nuclear superpower like the USSR doesn’t necessarily

pose an existential threat to it. And a mere regional power like Iran

certainly doesn’t.

This doesn’t mean a

nuclear-armed Iran couldn’t cause America plenty of pain; it could. But

pain isn’t an existential threat. The USSR also caused America plenty of

pain, including hundreds of thousands of soldiers killed or wounded in

several conventional wars against Soviet-backed forces. Yet overall,

America still flourished during that half-century of conflict.

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For a tiny country like Israel, in contrast, a nuclear

Iran is an existential threat. This isn’t merely because a single

nuclear bomb could wipe out much of the country; it’s also because

Israel is so badly outnumbered by hostile neighbors’ conventional

forces.

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Why Israel Needs a Better Political Class

Note: This piece is a response to an essay by Haviv Rettig Gur, which can be found here

Israel’s current political crisis exemplifies the maxim that hard cases make bad law. This case is desperate. Six months after the coronavirus erupted and nine months after the fiscal year began, Israel still lacks both a functioning contact-tracing system and an approved 2020 budget, mainly because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is more worried about politics than the domestic problems that Israel now confronts. The government’s failure to perform these basic tasks obviously invites the conclusion that civil servants’ far-reaching powers must not only be preserved, but perhaps even increased.

This would be the wrong conclusion. Bureaucrats, especially when they have great power, are vulnerable to the same ills as elected politicians. But unlike politicians, they are completely unaccountable to the public.

That doesn’t mean Haviv Rettig Gur is wrong to deem them indispensable. They provide institutional memory, flesh out elected officials’ policies, and supply information the politicians may not know and options they may not have considered. Yet the current crisis shows in several ways why they neither can nor should substitute for elected politicians.

First, bureaucrats are no less prone to poor judgment than politicians. As evidence, consider Siegal Sadetzki, part of the Netanyahu-led triumvirate that ran Israel’s initial response to the coronavirus. It’s unsurprising that Gur never mentioned Sadetzki even as he lauded the triumvirate’s third member, former Health Ministry Director General Moshe Bar Siman-Tov; she and her fellow Health Ministry staffers are a major reason why Israel still lacks a functional test-and-trace system.

Sadetzki, an epidemiologist, was the ministry’s director of public-health services and the only member of the triumvirate with professional expertise in epidemics (Bar Siman-Tov is an economist). As such, her input was crucial. Yet she adamantly opposed expanding virus testing, even publicly asserting that “Too much testing will increase complacence.” She opposed letting organizations outside the public-health system do lab work for coronavirus tests, even though the system was overwhelmed. She opposed sewage monitoring to track the spread of the virus. And on, and on.

Moreover, even after acknowledging that test-and-trace was necessary, ministry bureaucrats insisted for months that their ministry do the tracing despite its glaringly inadequate manpower. Only in August was the job finally given to the army, which does have the requisite personnel. And the system still isn’t fully operational.

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